Pandemic, practices and everyday life

Abstract

The general objective of this article is to understand the pandemic from a social practice  perspective. It starts from the assumption that a pandemic, rather than a problem of  geographical distribution of a disease, constitutes a sudden threat to the current flow of  everyday practices. As a process of rupture with everyday forms of being with others,  the pandemic demands the development of practices to deal with the different disturbances  of the perceived environment. Thus, in view of the importance of understanding  what and how actors do to respond to social scenarios, the article explores the theoretical  and methodological principles of contemporary socio-anthropological perspectives  - the “new sociologies” - which, inspired by existential-phenomenology and pragmatism,  seek to clarify and explain questions concerning the “ways of being in the world”  of different collectives. In this perspective, pandemic is configured according to the  space where the questioning is formulated; it is constituted as something that is done  in practice and of practices, in its materiality, in the associations that the actors make in  concrete situations. It is precisely because it is necessarily rooted in the world that the  pandemic acquires significance.